3.0 Actual Games Conversation

[PrimeElectrid]

I’m fortunate enough that my gaming group has no Dave’s so we don’t have to worry about his OP bonuses.

[yukishiro1]

They need to just make the maximum bonus you can get to save be +1, before rend modification, not after. I.e. a model with a 3+ can have +5 to its saves, rend -1 still means it's saving on a 3+. This fixes the issue with stuff that's effectively immune to everything but MWs, while still making high armor saves valuable.

There's a small category of stuff that gets screwed by this - largely stuff with +1 to saves natively, e.g. Marauders - but you can fix that by just moving their save up a point via errata. I.e. marauders aren't a 6+ save with a +1 if they have shields, they just get a 5+ save if they have shields. 

[Drazhoath]

3 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

They need to just make the maximum bonus you can get to save be +1, before rend modification, not after. I.e. a model with a 3+ can have +5 to its saves, rend -1 still means it's saving on a 3+. This fixes the issue with stuff that's effectively immune to everything but MWs, while still making high armor saves valuable.

There's a small category of stuff that gets screwed by this - largely stuff with +1 to saves natively, e.g. Marauders - but you can fix that by just moving their save up a point via errata. I.e. marauders aren't a 6+ save with a +1 if they have shields, they just get a 5+ save if they have shields. 

Before 3.0 started I thought the +1 save is before modifiers. When I realised that you can stack boni I knew what it means. Near unkillable Ironjaws, Slaves to Darkness or Vampire Heroes. Same in a game this weekend. Without mortal wounds it was near impossible to kill a Vampire Lord on Dragon (Mystic Shield, All out Defense, Heroic Our). Even rend-2 was nothing.

[Kadeton]

I remain unconvinced that the ability to stack save modifiers until you have an invulnerable hero is a "bug" and not a "feature". I'd suggest that the designers intended it that way, and it's something that needs to be played around, rather than "fixed".

Yes, you are no longer entitled to just pick your opponent's most valuable piece within your army's threat range and automatically delete it from the board. If you throw everything you have at one tough hero, you might not kill them. That can be annoying, for sure... but how often does it actually stop you winning the game if you play smart, target more vulnerable pieces instead, and focus on objectives?

One of the more frequent complaints towards the end of last edition was the feeling of "rocket tag". Powerful combat units would either annihilate their targets or get destroyed themselves, depending on who managed to attack first. Now we've got units that can face-tank those rockets and keep going - sounds to me like GW acknowledged the issue and provided counter-play. Save stacking generally requires considerable set-up in advance (e.g. using Finest Hour in your opponent's turn, casting Mystic Shield in the previous hero phase, etc). If you saw your opponent building up an impenetrable shield on their centrepiece model, and you threw all your killing power into it anyway and achieved nothing, then that was a terrible tactical decision and you probably deserved to lose?

There are currently big problems with this design intent, for sure - mainly that access to high-save monster heroes and ability to output mortal wounds aren't evenly distributed across the armies. I totally acknowledge that some armies don't have what they need to be competitive under the new rules paradigm. But I strongly feel that the solution to that is to give those armies what they need, not to take it away from everyone else.

[yukishiro1]

Stuff that's effectively immune to everything except MW isn't a good design paradigm, and the problem isn't that we have too little stuff that's effectively immune to everything except MW. Empowering 3+ save models to be immune to non-MW damage doesn't fix the lethality problem in the game, it just widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Giving every faction haves doesn't fix that issue as a matter of game design, you still end up obsoleting a massive portion of your game design space for no apparent reason. 

AOS 2 did have a lethality problem. Widening the gap between MW and non-MW by making units capable of becoming effectively immune to normal damage - especially while throwing more and more MW into the game on just about everything, as evidenced by the new units - doesn't fix that problem. It just moves you to a gimmicky game state of 2+ rend ignoring saves vs MW spam. 

Edited August 1, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Liquidsteel]

It's definitely intended and I think it's okay to an extent. 

A big tanky monster should definitely find a horde of ghouls or goblins to be nothing more than a nuisance, as opposed to a legitimate threat as it was in 2.0. 

However there's a disparity between how damage can be dealt now. GW is pushing out Mortal Wound dealing units left, right and centre, with nothing seemingly done to address the lack of rend. 

It's not okay for elite units to have zero rend or only rend -1 attacks now, even if their job is as horde clearers. I'd like to see rend -2 and -3 a lot more common on top tier units/heroes to bridge the gap.

[JackStreicher]

10 minutes ago, Liquidsteel said:

However there's a disparity between how damage can be dealt now. GW is pushing out Mortal Wound dealing units left, right and centre, with nothing seemingly done to address the lack of rend. 

I faced a Megaboss with a constant +2 to his save and other bonuses. It killed everything with its -3 rend weapon while being immune to everything. It was finally taken down by a very good charge of Annihalators,  the Lord Celestants cloak and a two luckily failed armour saves vs the annihilators.

[Blitzd]

3 hours ago, Kadeton said:

I remain unconvinced that the ability to stack save modifiers until you have an invulnerable hero is a "bug" and not a "feature". I'd suggest that the designers intended it that way, and it's something that needs to be played around, rather than "fixed".

Yes, you are no longer entitled to just pick your opponent's most valuable piece within your army's threat range and automatically delete it from the board. If you throw everything you have at one tough hero, you might not kill them. That can be annoying, for sure... but how often does it actually stop you winning the game if you play smart, target more vulnerable pieces instead, and focus on objectives?

One of the more frequent complaints towards the end of last edition was the feeling of "rocket tag". Powerful combat units would either annihilate their targets or get destroyed themselves, depending on who managed to attack first. Now we've got units that can face-tank those rockets and keep going - sounds to me like GW acknowledged the issue and provided counter-play. Save stacking generally requires considerable set-up in advance (e.g. using Finest Hour in your opponent's turn, casting Mystic Shield in the previous hero phase, etc). If you saw your opponent building up an impenetrable shield on their centrepiece model, and you threw all your killing power into it anyway and achieved nothing, then that was a terrible tactical decision and you probably deserved to lose?

There are currently big problems with this design intent, for sure - mainly that access to high-save monster heroes and ability to output mortal wounds aren't evenly distributed across the armies. I totally acknowledge that some armies don't have what they need to be competitive under the new rules paradigm. But I strongly feel that the solution to that is to give those armies what they need, not to take it away from everyone else.

Agreed, one of the biggest complaints about 2.0 was things dying to quickly, so they changed it and now people are complaining things aren't don't quick enough lol I had a game the other day, my opponent stacked saves on his mawcrusher, so I targeted everything else in his army and it was fine. 

[Benkei]

4 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Yes, you are no longer entitled to just pick your opponent's most valuable piece within your army's threat range and automatically delete it from the board.

OH, but you are, just not to the factions that are "entitled" to have heroes with good saves and multiple save bonuses. It just creates yet another have/have not feature for the game, which is BAD. Let me check how many 3+ save heroes do I get for my Slaanesh army... oh, wait, it's just Sigvald. 

They seem to think AoS is 40k, but Rend in AoS is actually quite scarce and usually has low values; making it irrelevant while supposedly it still is taken into account when pointing units is also BAD. There is gotta be a middle ground between killing heroes easily and having unkillable heroes that ignore a foundation block of the game, and maybe being able to screen and block LoS against shooting and not letting shooting units shoot even while engaged could be a first step instead of creating untested aberrations and pushing MW sillyness even further, because if you solution is giving everybody big save monsters and MW spam then what's the point on having different armies. They have a perfectly valid system balancing save bonuses and Rend values, but of course that takes more testing work than just "lol, MW or GTFO, bro". 

 

Edited August 1, 2021 by Benkei

[Enoby]

23 minutes ago, Blitzd said:

Agreed, one of the biggest complaints about 2.0 was things dying to quickly, so they changed it and now people are complaining things aren't don't quick enough lol I had a game the other day, my opponent stacked saves on his mawcrusher, so I targeted everything else in his army and it was fine. 

I don't think it's quite as simplistic as that. You're correct that people didn't like how quickly things died in AoS 2, but it's a misrepresentation to think people's complaints about immortal deathstar units are the same as complaining things are dying too quickly.

Immortal Mawkrusha in @JackStreicher's example wasn't just hard to kill, it was killing everything else. So the AoS 2 problem of things dying too quickly was still there, but it was attached to the AoS 3 problem of some units becoming incredibly hard to kill. 

Of course, that's not to say that everyone will have an issue with it or that it's definitely too strong, but it feels disingenuous to characterise the opposing argument as "lol people don't know what they want" because that's pretty obviously not the issue people are having. 

[Kadeton]

I would definitely like to see more access to higher levels of Rend on elite units, and significantly fewer sources of mortal wounds. Handing out unblockable damage to everyone is definitely not the way to make this work.

My main point is that it's a paradigm shift that players will have to get used to - some models will just be beyond your army's ability to kill right now, so how can you work around that instead of bashing your face into that brick wall hoping it will fall down?

It shouldn't be, IMO, a case of bringing enough mortal wounds to kill those models anyway. MWs have their place, but spamming them should always be priced to be inefficient overall. Instead,  it should be about making tactical decisions other than "That thing needs to die."

More Rend of -2 or better in the game wouldn't be about letting you kill the unkillable hero - if you stack every defensive tech you have on someone, they should be damn near unkillable! But it would make it much harder to spread those buffs around to make *multiple* units indestructible. Now that guy is too hard to take down? Cool, that means everything else is super vulnerable - go kill something else.

Edited August 1, 2021 by Kadeton

[PrimeElectrid]

1 hour ago, Blitzd said:

Agreed, one of the biggest complaints about 2.0 was things dying to quickly, so they changed it and now people are complaining things aren't don't quick enough lol I had a game the other day, my opponent stacked saves on his mawcrusher, so I targeted everything else in his army and it was fine. 

“Kill everything else lol” is this editions “just shoot the heroes lol”.

Anyway the issue is that rend 2 or higher is a) extremely rare b) pricey and c) both. Meanwhile those units that best abuse 3+ save are also packing ward saves in their profile, or just take a common artefact wtf GW for a 5++. Throwing 20 MW a turn at a 15 wound monster hero is just not something a lot of armies can do.

[yukishiro1]

2 hours ago, Kadeton said:

I would definitely like to see more access to higher levels of Rend on elite units, and significantly fewer sources of mortal wounds. Handing out unblockable damage to everyone is definitely not the way to make this work.

My main point is that it's a paradigm shift that players will have to get used to - some models will just be beyond your army's ability to kill right now, so how can you work around that instead of bashing your face into that brick wall hoping it will fall down?

It shouldn't be, IMO, a case of bringing enough mortal wounds to kill those models anyway. MWs have their place, but spamming them should always be priced to be inefficient overall. Instead,  it should be about making tactical decisions other than "That thing needs to die."

More Rend of -2 or better in the game wouldn't be about letting you kill the unkillable hero - if you stack every defensive tech you have on someone, they should be damn near unkillable! But it would make it much harder to spread those buffs around to make *multiple* units indestructible. Now that guy is too hard to take down? Cool, that means everything else is super vulnerable - go kill something else.

I mean ok, but that's not the game we have. We have a game where GW made a bunch of stuff unkillable except with MW, but extremely killable with spammed MW, which they have also tossed onto almost every new unit they've put in the game. Then clearly didn't point the 3+ save, or MW, correctly to reflect the new greater value of each. If this is intentional, it's an odd sort of intention. 

They didn't really address the lethality of 2, they just changed what's lethal and what isn't. As well as adding a universal unreliable, short-range prayer that makes basically everything incredibly lethal if you can manage to get the prayer off. 

Edited August 1, 2021 by yukishiro1

[NinthMusketeer]

Thing is, stuff isn't effectively immune anymore. Bar OBR everyone lost save re-rolls. A stacked save to be effectively 2+ still fails on 1s. Notice something; while many units can achieve such save stacking it is only heroes that are being raised as problematic examples. Heroes that heal, thanks to heroic recovery. Sylvaneth were also raised and again, they heal (a lot). Being extremely resistant to damage still means 1s fail and the thing will die eventually. The problem is when that is combined with healing so that it doesn't die eventually.

This is an EXTREMELY important distinction to make. Because the direct way to counter that is offense hitting so hard that there isn't time to heal (either by buffing offense or nerfing defense) and then we are back to square one. What we need is a healing nerf.

That said, we do need more rend and less MWs. I will not stop complaining about there being more units dealing MWs than rend -2 until it is addressed.

[pnkdth]

Can we get to posting stuff about actual games again? 

If MWs and rend impacts your games, how? Against what/who? How did you deal with it? Any insights based on experience?

[Grimrock]

43 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

Can we get to posting stuff about actual games again? 

If MWs and rend impacts your games, how? Against what/who? How did you deal with it? Any insights based on experience?

I've been focusing on slaves to darkness so saves have come up a fair bit. My chaos warriors have been all stars sitting on central objectives with a +1-3 to save and reroll 1s, and a 5+ mortal ward save, meaning even against dedicated high quality units they just sit there and take it for an average of about 4 rounds. My chaos lord on manticore with the amulet and a command trait for 2 extra wounds has also been a real champion. I regularly dump a lot of resources into him to make that happen though so I'm not sure of he's great or anyone would be great in that position. 

I went up against an elite soulblight build last week with mannfred, vhordrai, blood knights and assorted support. It was pretty rough actually. I didn't seem to have anything to crack  Vhordrai who was on a 2+ save most of the game. I did chip him a few wounds a turn, but they were always healed almost immediately. The blood knights just refused to die as well and hit really hard. Combined with his massive magical superiority I felt like I was on the back foot most of the game. If it weren't for the save stacking on the warriors I would have been tabled by turn 3, but with them I was able to focus on scenario. Even then I was constantly bleeding assets and just holding on by the skin of my teeth as he steadily ground me down. It ended really close and I only lost by a single point at the end of round 5, so playing for scenario absolutely matters, but a few more failed saves on my warriors and I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Edited August 1, 2021 by Grimrock

[Sleboda]

13 hours ago, Enoby said:

... it feels disingenuous to characterise the opposing argument as "lol people don't know what they want" because that's pretty obviously not the issue people are having. 

It's also worth remembering that "people" are not one thing.

The "people" who complained about stuff getting killed too quickly before may very well not be the "people" who are now complaining that things don't die fast enough.

It's really easy to think of people/gamers/fans as a unified entity. They are not.

This means that tons of (most?) "people" are not failing to figure out what they want. It's just that different individuals within the group are speaking up now.

[Carnith]

Since the start of 3rd, I've played around 4 games. Two as Ironjawz and two as Slaanesh. First ironjawz was vs night haunt at 1k each. Second ironajwz game was vs BOC. 

I find Ironjawz a lot of fun. It's pure fighting. 

Mawkrusha stacked with saves and heals felt invincible. The Amulet of Destiny is way too good, and I wish faction artifacts were better than the universals, we will see with the books coming up how this fairs. my 1k list doesn't have a mawkrusha and has 20 brutes, megaboss, and two support heroes (at least one warchanter)

The other two games I played as slaanesh vs Beasts of chaos. One game was close. Second game I got stomped on, though I mispositioned and had some of the worst dice rolls anyone could have. 

Slaanesh struggles to make a great feeling list. The army would be in a better position with its third edition points. 

[SchleuderMann2]

Yesterday I played Hallowheart against sons of behemath. My list was gotrek, a hurricanum with 20 crossbowmen, some other wirzards with endless spells and some guards. His list consisted of 2 big giants and 6 little ones. Although the matchup was almost perfect for gotrek, I have to say that he feels much stronger then last edition: cheaper, Ms, spell for flying, spell for monster, aod, aoa, and so much healing. I think right now the only possibility to handle him is just to kite him if that is possible...

[Battlefury]

For the general issue of the massive save & damage bloat I'd suggest it might be time for "strenght vs toughness". Therefore we could eliminate a lot of save stacking and MW spam, since the intended result can be achieved otherwise. A big monster wouldn't be scared of a little goblin group, cause his toughness would be a good and solid thing against their strenth. So effectively the Rend mechanic could become a thing for really good weapons, maaybe even artifacts. And any MW output could be very rare overall then. Mostly for wizards & spells maybe.

[Ragest]

On 8/1/2021 at 1:02 PM, Benkei said:

OH, but you are, just not to the factions that are "entitled" to have heroes with good saves and multiple save bonuses. It just creates yet another have/have not feature for the game, which is BAD. Let me check how many 3+ save heroes do I get for my Slaanesh army... oh, wait, it's just Sigvald. 

They seem to think AoS is 40k, but Rend in AoS is actually quite scarce and usually has low values; making it irrelevant while supposedly it still is taken into account when pointing units is also BAD. There is gotta be a middle ground between killing heroes easily and having unkillable heroes that ignore a foundation block of the game, and maybe being able to screen and block LoS against shooting and not letting shooting units shoot even while engaged could be a first step instead of creating untested aberrations and pushing MW sillyness even further, because if you solution is giving everybody big save monsters and MW spam then what's the point on having different armies. They have a perfectly valid system balancing save bonuses and Rend values, but of course that takes more testing work than just "lol, MW or GTFO, bro". 

 

Mate, you have a big guy with 3+ save, 18 wounds, fnp 5++, self healing, giving -1 to hit in area and +1 to cast Mystic shield. 

[Enoby]

23 minutes ago, Ragest said:

Mate, you have a big guy with 3+ save, 18 wounds, fnp 5++, self healing, giving -1 to hit in area and +1 to cast Mystic shield. 

Yeah in all honesty Slaanesh is a weirdly tanky faction with Glutos being the tankiest chaos hero (compare him to the poor Glottkin - he's better defensively in pretty much every way). I'd even put him above Archaon for the 5++ ward (very useful against high damage attacks).   

[papary]

1 hour ago, Enoby said:

Yeah in all honesty Slaanesh is a weirdly tanky faction with Glutos being the tankiest chaos hero (compare him to the poor Glottkin - he's better defensively in pretty much every way). I'd even put him above Archaon for the 5++ ward (very useful against high damage attacks).   

 Poor Glotkin, i've taken him in 3/4 games and he has been utterly useless. I want to make him work, but at this point I don't think its possible, his spell is decent on Blightkings, but other than that he hasn't done much except get tied up dealing with daemonetttes/ liberators. 

 

I dont want to drop him so I'll take him again tomorrow night, but I'm on the verge of just getting another GUO.

[Enoby]

2 minutes ago, papary said:

 Poor Glotkin, i've taken him in 3/4 games and he has been utterly useless. I want to make him work, but at this point I don't think its possible, his spell is decent on Blightkings, but other than that he hasn't done much except get tied up dealing with daemonetttes/ liberators. 

 

I dont want to drop him so I'll take him again tomorrow night, but I'm on the verge of just getting another GUO.

I'd love to see a Glottkin rework - for such a great and imposing model he doesn't really have the rules to back it up

[readercolin]

Had a few games yesterday, my store is doing a path to glory league starting at 600 points.

I did 2 games with phoenix guard backed up by a caster with the emerald lifeswarm.  A squad of 10 phoenix guard is enough to mow through most enemies, and the emerald lifeswarm meant that even though one opponent killed 9/10 of the guard, they were back up to full strength by the end of the game.  Since you have a chance of getting casualties for each model that died in the unit in a path to glory campaign, which will then cost you glory points to recuperate, being able to end the game back at full strength can save you a lot of glory points.

Aside from the pure tankyness that is phoenix guard though, I do have some issues with path to glory.  A lot of the battles have been focused on "bodies on a location", which gives more hordy factions more power, and also can make more skirmishy armies less useful.  Got a bunch of dudes you can charge in and get frisky with?  Your army will do great for Path to Glory.  Want to do some chip damage and use your mobility to whittle down your opponent?  Hope you like losing a lot.  Additionally, all the battles start with everyone really close to each other, meaning you generally are getting off charges on turn 1, which makes some armies much more useful than others.

Basically, it seems that GW has learned a good bit about what makes for some fun, balanced, and diverse games for tournament play, and you can see this with their multiple battleplans and scoring systems.  But then they appear to have forgotten to apply any of that to anything other than matched play, and those other play methods are suffering for that.